Every so often, a cherished myth of the Left’s historical narrative comes apart. That is why keeping the flame alive by repeating the myths gives sustenance to the Left’s chosen causes. I learned this the hard way when I wrote The Rosenberg File with Joyce Milton in 1983.

To the Left, it was imperative that the Rosenbergs — who were found guilty of “conspiracy to commit espionage” and sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman after the trial — be innocent. If they were not, it would mean that they were not martyrs for peace, arrested and tried for their “progressive” and anti-war politics and their opposition to the impending fascism and anti-Soviet hysteria of the Truman administration. Rather, if actually guilty, it would mean that the United States had a right to protect itself against those who were working on behalf of the Soviet Union by seeking to ferret out atomic secrets on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime.

To acknowledge the truth, in other words, meant that those on the Left would have to question their most cherished beliefs.

When the book came out, it was only thirty years after the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing prison, and many of those who fought on their behalf were still around and active. Thus they engaged in a massive campaign to discredit our findings and to smear us as tools of the FBI and the Reagan administration, which they charged was trying once again to undermine the cause of peace and to seek war with the still existing Soviet Union.

That is the charge that the Nation magazine’s editor-in-chief, Victor Navasky, made in the magazine’s editorial. As for the American Communist Party, its chief, Gus Hall, attacked us for smearing the Rosenbergs, whom he tellingly referred to as “the sacred couple.”

Now, a brave left-wing historian named Timothy Messer-Kruse — despite his own self-proclaimed “social-democratic” politics — has walked into the minefield.

In the latest issue of National Review, writer John J. Miller has penned an article — “What Happened at Haymarket?” — that takes up one of the Left’s most longstanding historical myths: the one surrounding events that took place the night of May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Formerly, Messer-Kruse would tell his students:

A gathering of anarchists near Haymarket Square turned into a fatal bombing and riot. Although police never arrested the bomb-thrower, they went on to tyrannize radical groups throughout the city, in a crackdown that is often called America’s first Red Scare. Eight men were convicted of aiding and abetting murder. Four died at the end of a hangman’s noose. Today, history books portray them as the innocent victims of a sham trial: They are labor-movement martyrs who sought modest reforms in the face of ruthless robber-baron capitalism.

To the present day, those events have been a staple in the portrayal of the United States as a nation unjust to those it oppressed, which included workingmen who sought only to gain protection for their rights against rapacious capitalists.

Miller explains that a group of peaceful protesters had gathered to demand an eight-hour workday. Many were anarchists, but Messer-Kruse formerly believed:

They were mainly a peace-loving bunch who simply wanted to improve their wretched conditions. As police arrived to bust up the crowd, someone tossed a bomb. No one knows who did it — perhaps an anarchist agitator.

Howard Zinn wrote in his best-selling People’s History of the United States that it likely was “an agent of the police, an agent provocateur.” Police fired their guns, and seven of their group and some protesters lay dead. Authorities blamed the deaths on the radicals, who were rounded up and convicted without evidence; four were hung, one committed suicide, and three were later pardoned. The Left’s narrative is explained by Miller:

Ever since, Haymarket has occupied a central place in progressive lore. The international labor movement honors May Day as its holiday in part because of its proximity on the calendar to Haymarket’s anniversary. In the United States, Haymarket ranks alongside the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs as a fable of anti-radical persecution. Well into the 20th Century, its notoriety provoked violent rage. In 1969, Bill Ayers and an accomplice from the Weather Underground engaged in their own Haymarket terror, bombing a statue that honored the fallen policemen of 1886. “This is too good — it’s us against the pigs, a medieval contest of good and evil,” wrote Ayers of the affair in his memoir, Fugitive Days.

Historian Messer-Kruse believed the standard left-progressive mythology. But a student’s question about what happened during the trial led him to look anew at the events from that sad day in 1886. The result was his brave exploration of what had been until now the standard take on Haymarket. Just as most of the college textbooks portrayed the Rosenbergs as innocent, the Left’s narrative was repeated verbatim, and as Miller writes, “entered mainstream education.” The left-wing labor historian James Green explained in a 2006 account:

The Haymarket case challenged, like no other episode in the nineteenth century, the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all.

Imagine Messer-Kruse’s shock when his own careful scholarly examination of Haymarket revealed that most of what the Left taught about the event was based on both shoddy scholarship and ideological wish-fulfillment.

47 Comments, 27 Threads

1.
Alex Bensky

One of the grimly amusing things that I noticed when your book came out, Mr. Radosh, is precisely that claim that in finding that the Rosenbergs were guilty you were abetting anti-Semtism. It should be mentioned that the Rosenbergs were among those people more accurately described as “of Jewish heritage,” since they made no particular identification with fellow Jews unless it was politically profitable to do so.

But in fact one reason the Communist Party wanted to make martyrs of the Rosenbergs was in order to deflect attention in the US and the rest of the west from the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia, which were indeed the result of anti-Semitism in large part.

I was interested to learn the part about people discouraging you because they were trying to recruit communists into what you call the social democratic movement, Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, later known as Democratic Socialists of America.

As it happened, the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas split in late 1972, the more radical group becoming the DSOC and the more mainstream group becoming Social Democrats, USA. (The organization by that name today is not the same group.) I was at the convention when the split occurred, took one look at who was going with Harrington, and immediately signed up with the SD. Nothing I have seen since indicates I made a mistake.

It was those of us in SD, USA, whom Harrington termed “neoconservatives.” Based on the term’s origins and its history, it’s a title I still bear proudly.

Thank you for your comment,Alex. You may want to read, if you haven’t already, my article “A Tale of Two Trials” that you can find on the website of World Affairs Magazine, about the Slansky and Rosenberg trials. At the time I was a member of the Harrington group, and none of them, including Harrington and Irving Howe, would endorse my book. Then I was told by another leader of the left faction the statement I cited in this column.
As you may know, I eventually quit DSA and like you, joined the SD’s.

Quite a display of self-aggrandizement. Ron Radosh, martyr to the truth, who discovered in the 1980s that the Rosenbergs were guilty. I on the other hand knew very few people in the 50s who thought the Rosenbergs were innocent. But of course my fiends and I were neither communists nor members of the Democratic Socialists or any other far left group. We were just good ol’ liberal Dems. Too bad you missed that step in your evolution, Ron.

You’re missing what may be the single most important issue behind Ron’s post: The Left has captured the narrative and twisted the truth beyond recognition. In the 50′s we still had a traditional American narrative, but in the intervening decades, both education and media establishments pushed further and further left. At the time of the Rosenbergs the practicing Communist Howard Zinn had not yet written his infamous American history” book.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in a liberal – not Communist- environment, and I recall a number of family friends claiming that Alger Hiss was innocent. There were a fair number of liberals back then who believed that or believed that the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were innocent. The term anti-anti-Communist comes to mind. According to many liberals at that time, only ignorant knuckle-draggers believed that the likes of Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were guilty.

I think you’re speaking with forked tongue. Your attitude is rude and your claim is, at best, debatable. Everyone I know on the left or those who called themselves liberal democrats were certain that the Rosenbergs were framed, used and wrongly convicted.

I suspect that the liberal Democrats of that era were more “classical liberal”. Some time in the 60′s, the leftists who were in favor of a despotic government started calling themselves “liberals”, and those are the ones who defend the Rosenbergs.

Those who favor despotic government are very good at singing whatever tune is required to sucker the masses.

The distinction between ‘classical liberalism’ and our modern-day liberalism goes much further back than we realise. There’s an essay discussing this in Herbert Spencer’s “The Man Versus The State”, which was originally published here in 1892. This particular work is still in print, with the intro by Albert Jay Nock.

“To the present day, those events have been a staple in the portrayal of the United States as a nation unjust to those it oppressed, which included workingmen who sought only to gain protection for their rights against rapacious capitalists.”

Oppressed workers and rapacious capitalists during the Gilded Age? Preposterous!

I think he means the historian would be asassinated. As to the alternative interpretation, I, too, hope we never have an intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Barack Hussein Obama Avenue in every city and town in America, but at least we’d know what intersection to avoid.

Obama just granted himself lifetime protection from large men with guns who are paid enormous sums by the taxpayers. Before he’s done, he could reenact Hitler’s technique of 5 concentric circle of ever more well-armed legions. After all, he merits protection as the greatest egomaniac since, well, the greatest egomaniac.

I did a high school history teacher curriculum unit on Haymarket about ten years ago. Its focus was more on the ideology of the anarchists, not their guilt or innocence. I assumed they were innocent, technically. I did think many of them had a truly crazy infatuation with revolutionary violence.

One minor aside the has always gnawed at me has to do with Albert Parson’s wife Lucy and their son Albert Jr. Lucy is considered as much a hero and martyr as her husband, who was hanged for the bombing. The son Albert Jr., however, rejected his father’s politics. At one point, long after the trial, he enraged his mother when he decided to join the army in the Spanish-American War. Supposedly, according to the skimpy accounts I’ve seen, he went insane and Lucy put him in an asylum, where he later died of TB. I’ve always wondered about a woman who would do that to her son, though perhaps he really was insane. I wrote to Professor Messer-Kruse about this. I wonder here also if anyone has ever heard anything about this. I think probably Alebrt Jr. was insane and maybe Lucy did what she did with no real alternative. Still, I have to wonder at a champion of the downtrodden doing this to her son. I have sensed that no one on the left ever has wanted to know the truth about it, however, and who else but those on the left would even know to wonder? Anyway, be interested if any does know more.

“……Much to his surprise and consternation, Messer-Kruse was confronted by others’ “utter and complete denial of the evidence……..”

So, Messer-Kruse was “surprised.” Just another example of the unbelievable level of stupidity and idiocy of those on the left. Here they are, members of a “belief system” that is based on lies, falsehoods, misrepresentations, deceit and one that rationalizes and/or accepts mass exterminations as necessary “evils” and this moron is surprised that his leftist pals have turned on him.

Well, he can go F himself.

I have zero sympathy for this useful idiot because it is vermin like him that have continued to promote, encourage and propagandize for an ideology that has resulted in more mass murders than any ideology in world history ( and this includes the national SOCIALISM of Hitler).

I once thought I was a true independent voter, making my choice on merit…

Then came 1994 and the Clinton criminal bill.

I sat down and tried to recall everyone I had voted for, and discovered I had voted straight Democrat. No alternative source of info, just what was in the news papers and on TV or radio.

So, I started digging on the net, and discovered that there was an alternative, one that was much more sensible. Mostly.

Then I started studying the Republicans. I don’t really care for them at all.

But, even if an individual Democratic Party candidate is a better choice, he carries with him the coalition and the need to support that coalition. Republicans, simply smell like an open sewer. Democrats, like a pig sty.

For the Left, what is true is what furthers the Revolution. “Objectivity” is merely a construct of the ruling class used to further its power and oppress the People. So the Left believes and has believed since Marx.

Below is a recent, interesting discussion of liberals, communists and fascists by John Gray (Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics) in reviewing the book ” THE DEVIL IN HISTORY – COMMUNISM, FASCISM AND SOME LESSONS OF THE 20TH CENTURY,” by Vladimir Tismaneana.

John Gray suggests a reason why liberals are STILL !! drawn to communism and the reason he provides is very similar to that provided over 60 years ago by Whittaker Chambers in “WITNESS.”

“…..One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress……..”

Who was there when it happened.
(Eyewitnesses, apprehended at the scene vs arrested “later”)

Where is the data, who collected, it and how.
(crime scene photos, ballistics reports, fingerprints, wire taps)

If you closely examine these in any “controversial” event, trial, assassination or what have you, they will generally led you to sympathize with, or be skeptical of, ONE particular “side” verses another. It is so, because it is simply impossible to ‘Fake” so much spontaneously occurring information, particularly when multiple unrelated sources immediately supply corroborating information, that is only FOUND to be corroborating later.

It is only AFTER the basic information becomes “known” that the spin/counter spin can occur, and I simply ignore all who tell me what something “means” when the facts alone will lead me to the most reasonable and likely conclusion.

Whenever anyone one suggests, as a “defense” of their position, that’s its POSSIBLE for a different event/circumstance/conclusion to be reached only through the acceptance of a LESS PLAUSIBLE event that leaves MORE unanswered/unanswerable complexities, I regard that position as partisan before the fact. Especially if the promoter of such fantasies has a history of ax-grinding for the side they are (by coincidence?) allied with now.

Examples abound, from multiple “live news” witnesses of the Kennedy Assassination all hearing 3 shots, to the full set of (B-36?) Bomber Blueprints Mr. Rosenberg passed to his contact.

The Idea that “multiple shooters” in Dallas fired SIMULTANEOUSLY to “mask” each other ignores the acoustic realities of sound and distance from multiple perspectives, not to mention the impossible coordination that would be required to do that under lab conditions, nevermind a public street…Obsessing over the “artists renderings” of autopsy photos as evidence (because the “surgical alterations” of the frontal wounds were unconvincing, and thus the actual photos would reveal that flaw in the plan?) changes NOT ONE BIT the implausibility of such intimate details being shared among conspirators.

“yup, above and behind…that’s what this is supposed to look like”…

Seriously? THAT’S your theory? .

Similarly, Mr Rosenberg either did or DID NOT knowingly pass a full set of blueprints of the most advanced ATOMIC BOMBING PLATFORM we had, to a soviet spy. Pointing out the crudeness of the “Atomic Bomb Diagram” he is also accused of sending, saying it wasn’t very “technical”, thus they wouldn’t have learned much from it, is in no way exculpable.

It is (pun intended) a “Red Herring” employed in desperation to pad a POLITICAL or EMOTIONAL argument, when the cold hard facts cannot otherwise be effectively challenged.

Mr Radosh write “A brave left-leaning historian challenges his ideological brethren.” Mr Radosh might well be perfectly correct but I would like to give a different guess on this.

I myself am not one who believes a leftist suddenly, or slowly for that matter, sees a light, or sees the light, and mounts a challenge to his ideological brethren. More likely a leftest is discarding former doctrinal and propaganda positions as he feels he needs to realign the left movement and feels the need to adapt a new message.

For example, when the Black Book on Communism came out it too was celebrated as a challenge to left wing orthodoxy.

But actuality the leftists who wrote the book were merely, and seriously, jettisoning Bolshevism. Bolshevism had become a liability because of its overt and caustic practices and proved too vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that Reagan mounted.

Clearly, the events described in the Black Book of Communism were nothing new. The facts were known when they happened by those who weren’t blind at the time they happened and who would later expose them. Everyone on the left knew the facts, and the significance of their reporting them later is that their popular front propaganda was changing.

This is not to dismiss the importance of these kinds of second though events. They are, after all, some kind of unraveling of what the Left would like to do.

It is only that I wouldn’t get too happy when someone on the left points these things out.

Two other examples of the same mentality at work are the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial and the JFK assassination “conspiracy theories”.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt in the murder of the guard during the robbery was proven conclusively by the ballistics evidence of the guns they used, found in their possession when they were arrested, with their fingerprints on both weapons and the ammunition (i.e., they loaded the weapons themselves).

Nevertheless, “progressives” determined to preserve their reputation as “martyrs” keep insisting on new tests to prove that the original tests were rigged to frame the pair. They are disappointed every time, but never admit that the authorities got it right the first time. Whatever their motivations, anarchism, “liberation” , revolution, or just plain pecuniary, Sacco & Vanzetti committed murder in commission of an armed robbery. Which would still get them a lethal injection each today, in most states.

As for JFK, Oswald shot him because, as a disaffected would-be Communist who was so weird that even the Soviet Union wouldn’t let him stay, he saw the President visiting Dallas and going right past the place he (Oswald) worked as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to “make a name for himself” in far-left circles. By killing the man who he saw as having embarrassed two of his (Oswald’s) personal heroes, Castro and Khrushchev, a year earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Having Connolly, a man he bore a personal hatred for (re his remarks about Oswald’s attempted murder of retired General Walker several weeks earlier) in range at the same time, was just icing on the cake from Oswald’s point of view.

The left has constructed elaborate theories about the CIA, Mafia, etc., to avoid admitting that their idol, JFK, was killed by one of their own. Because he wasn’t far enough to the left to be “acceptable”. (See “Olof Palme’”.)

The punch line is that, while the left worships JFK as a “martyred god” today, in his lifetime they really didn’t like him very much, at all. But making a martyr of him has, in their minds, excused and justified much of the havoc they have wrought since then.

Having lived with people of this mindset in my own family, I long ago learned that it is pointless to even try to make them see the contradictions in their beliefs. They simply respond that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a reactionary, and of course too stupid to understand how brilliant they truly are.

I wonder if they will say the same thing when reality finally hits them in the face, once and for all. The reckoning cannot be postponed forever.

And at the rate they are going, it will get here sooner than any of them would ever believe possible. Just like the Athenians learned in the Peloponnesian War.

Old-school anarchists at least had the vellum of insane ideals to mask themselves. Today’s anarchists just want to break stuff and be home in time to check their twitter and wolf K.D. Rations. “Stick it to the Man, Man”.

A process similar to the Rosenberg case and Haymarket is unfolding even today. I refer to the Trayvon Martin case, and the narrative demonizing George Zimmerman and presenting Martin as an innocent victim.

I’m not sure the cases are entirely parallel. Unlike Radosh, I was never a habitué of the Left, so I can’t dispute his account of the Left credo on the Rosenbergs. But back in the 1970s, prominent lefty Sidney Lens wrote of the Rosenbergs that even if they were guilty, all they did was pass information to a wartime ally. I took this as a tacit admission that they were guilty.

No one could ever say that about the Haymarket men.

Also, the “historical” verdict on Haymarket came very quickly and more authoritatively. The fact that Altgeld pardoned the three surviving Haymarket convicts only seven years later suggests that there were grave doubts even then.

And Altgeld was hailed as a hero from his death in 1902. It’s hard to see how leftists could have rewritten history so quickly.

Another point: the other great left-martyr cases – Sacco and Vanzetti, Hiss, the Rosenbergs – were always ambiguous in my awareness. (I came of age in the 1960s, already a conservative.) But I never saw any questioning of the Haymarket story.

It would be interesting to see how the Haymarket story was established, and what made it convincing.

Another question is: Who were the editors who allowed Norman Markowitz to insert his propaganda in American National Biography? These enablers should be identified.

Concerning Eric Foner, someone recommended his book on Reconstruction as the standard text. But from what I’ve heard of his political leanings, I’m suspecting that his books will be too slanted to be worth the reading time.

“What does it matter at this point!” This will be the left’s answer to all historical course corrections from now on. We have completely lost the narrative to the Communist Party of America and we think we need to debunk a one hundred and thirty year old lie. Why not fight the living enemies of our country? They will tell ten more lies to replace the ancient one that has been debunked.

This reminds me of when a supervising professor from the School of Education came to observe my student teacher. We were still at colonial and early American history, and he commented to me about whites had ‘taught the practice of scalping to Native Americans.’ I told him politely that the evidence suggested otherwise–that the practice was in use before Europeans even arrived.

He did not believe me, so I later sent him the name and issue number of an American Heritage article written by a historian of early America with impeccable credentials. The article featured drawings, along with a wealth of solidly documented evidence.

Needless to say, I received no reply and have no doubt he continued to espouse his version, regardless of the evidence. I haven’t seen an American Heritage in a long time (this article appeared in the early ’70s, I think) so I wonder if they would even publish it now?